I'm so glad that you have found my blog. Its main purpose is to provide items of interest to orthodox Anglicans who love the Gospel of Jesus, believe the Catholic Faith, yearn for the Church's unity and work for the evangelisation of the world. God bless you.

Monday, August 1, 2016

I feel sorry for Dr Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) whenever I hear him being compared unfavourably with Newman and others of his contemporaries. Sometimes he is dismissed with faint praise (in a way that Newman never is) for being primarily a "scholar", and a crusty one at that! Of course, Dr Pusey was a very great theologian and Biblical scholar. Yet a lot of what he wrote and preached is characterised by simplicity and depth, revealing so much about him as a person, as a Christian and as a spiritual guide. Father John Hunwicke spoke for many when he said in his blog a few years ago that Pusey was “one of the very greatest Catholic teachers and spiritual directors of the modern period.”

Unfortunately there persists a popular image of Pusey as gloomy, grim, sad and penitential all the time. Now, it is true that throughout his long life he had more than his fair share of personal disappointments and real tragedies (one or two of which might have crushed a weaker person). Each of these left its mark on him. Yet it is precisely they which make his sermons and spiritual writings all the more relevant to us when we struggle. What he says can never be dismissed as trite or untested by experience. We also know that he would often mutter the penitential psalms under his breath. But in his sermons, reflections, letters, meditations and prayers we find a man who like St Paul scaled the heights as well as plumbed the depths both of human life and spiritual reality, a man whose walk with God drew many to the Saviour. So, today I share with you these paragraphs from Pusey's sermon, "Miracles of Prayer", preached at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, on Septuagesima Sunday, 1866. The entire sermon can be downloaded in pdf formatHERE. I have also included four of my favourites from among Pusey's prayers.

Prayer is "the ascent of the soul to God;" it is the beginning of that blessed converse, which shall be the exhaustless fulness of eternal bliss; it is the continuance or renewal of union with God.. . . Blessed dissatisfaction of man's craving soul; glorious restlessness, the token of its Divine birth, its Divine end; that nothing can satisfy it, except what is the bliss of its God, Infinite, Divine love.

Imperfect, faltering, unsatisfactory as are our prayers, their defects but shew the more the goodness of our God, who is never weary of those who are so soon wearied of him, who lets not fall a single earnest cry to him for himself. Not one prayer, from the yearning of the penitent ("would, God, for love of Thee, I had never offended Thee!"), to the love-enkindled longing of the Saint ("My God, and my All!)" but will have enlarged thy capacity for the infinite love of God, and will have drawn down to thee the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost, who is Love Infinite, the Bond of the love of the Father and the Son.

It will guard thee from all evil in the perilous passage through this world; it will sanctify to thee all thy joys; it will be to thee a calm above nature in all thy sorrows; it will give a supernatural value to all thy acts; it will heal all thine infirmities; it will illumine all thy knowledge; and, when thy flesh and thy heart shall fail, thy last prayer upon earth in the Name of Jesus shall melt into thy first Halleluiah in heaven, where, too, doubtless prayer shall never cease, but the soul shall endlessly desire of God, what God shall unintermittingly supply, more and yet more of the exhaustless, ever-filling fulness of Divine Beauty and Wisdom and Love, yea of himself who is Love.